Photo by Tiffany L. Clark
I’m an art historian, curator, and critic based in Rochester, New York, and am invested in institutional change toward diversity and inclusion. Currently, I am Assistant Professor of Art History at Rochester Institute of Technology. I received my PhD from Stanford University in 2015 from the Department of Art & Art History, and my research focuses on issues of race and ethnicity in modern and contemporary art, drawing heavily on ideas central to conceptual art, black studies and feminist thought.
The question of American identity inspires my research on U.S.-based artists who are constantly expanding that question – and the question of humanism, more broadly – in generative directions. I study the art made by African American, Asian American, Latinx, Indigenous, and other diasporic cultures with a critical race studies methodology, uniting my training in American art and Contemporary art history. My teaching privileges accessible course design, object-based pedagogy, and experiential learning, and incorporates perspectives from feminist and queer theory, postcolonial and ethnic studies, and disability studies. Living artists and their ideas are the center of my curatorial work – I respect them, enjoy thinking alongside them, and love learning from them.
Current: Charles Gaines and I co-curated the exhibition RETROaction, along with Homi Bhabha and Kate Fowle, at at Hauser & Wirth 69th Street (November 2023-Jan 2024). Read the New York Times review here. Our contribution revisited the 1993 exhibition Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, which Charles co-curated with Catherine Lord at UC Irvine. Thinking about the conceptual framework of this 1993 exhibition in the context of 2023, we invited four New York-based artists working in abstraction to participate: Torkwase Dyson, Kevin Beasley, Leslie Hewitt, and Rashid Johnson. The exhibition concluded with a symposium on “Nowness and Prophetic Criticism” – which brought together Charles Gaines, myself, and Homi Bhabha in the first panel. The second panel featured curators Thelma Golden and Jessica Bell Brown, and artists Charles Gaines, Zoe Leonard, and Torkwase Dyson. A recording is available here.
Upcoming: RETROaction Part Two opens at Hauser & Wirth’s Los Angeles location on February 27, 2024. This show expands the framework of Theater of Refusal to include the four artists featured in New York as well as L.A.-based artists Mark Bradford, Edgar Arceneaux, Lauren Halsey, and Rodney McMillan, and Chicago-based artists Caroline Kent and Tony Lewis.
ellen[dot]tani[at]gmail[dot]com